Abortion in Canada: Religious and ideological dimensions of women's attitudes

Abstract

This paper examines a number of demographic and sociocultural factors (e.g., age, marital status, family size, religion, religious assiduity, sex‐role ideology) as predictors of women's attitudes toward abortion, using data from the Canadian Fertility Survey of 1984. The findings suggest that women's abortion attitudes are to a greater extent based on ideological positions. It appears that anti‐abortion stance affects those women who are religious, presumably by increasing the relationship between their general sex‐role ideological stances and abortion attitudes. Abortion attitudes also vary according to a woman's education, her family size, and province/region of residence.